


Steve's Diary

by lady_wordsmith



Series: Steve's Diary Tetralogy [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Break Up, Character Death, Death, Diary/Journal, F/M, Heavy Angst, Reader-Insert, Romance, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 22:12:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5802127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_wordsmith/pseuds/lady_wordsmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Steve dies, you're given the diary you had no idea he had. You don't think you deserve it, after everything that happened between the two of you before his death, but you take it anyway. What you learn crushes you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steve's Diary

**Author's Note:**

> The first line came from a first line generator located here: http://writingexercises.co.uk/firstlinegenerator.php  
> From there, this story resulted.

They found his diary under his bed. His bed in Avengers Tower, that was. Most of the things he had kept in the apartment the two of you used to share had long been moved back to the Tower, though when they told you the news, you had run to the closet after they left and found yourself clutching one of the shirts he’d left behind. You had breathed in his scent on the shirt between sobs, before picking yourself up off the floor and telling yourself to be strong, that he had already been gone from your life before this, and you had no right to grieve like you were.

But the diary. The diary was found under his bed in the tower, probably by Bucky or Nat, or maybe even Tony, who knew? It was thick, heavy, and bound in leather, and you yourself had mistaken it for a sketchbook at first when it was given to you. A sketchbook made sense, after all.  After the funeral, after it was all said and done, Nat had been the one to give the diary to you. You looked at her, incredulous. Didn’t she _know_? Didn’t any of them?

 _He must have kept it a secret_ , you thought, finding yourself unable to speak as you looked down at the diary in your hands, and Nat’s words faded into white noise as you kept your gaze on the damned book.

You found yourself smiling a tight smile, one that probably resembled rictus more than anything else, and managed to choke out a thank you to her before you found yourself murmuring an “Excuse me,” and  walking away, desperately needing air.

 _A diary was worse than his sketchbooks_ , you thought, clutching the leather book to your chest as you fled the church and desperately gasped for air. You remembered telling Steve once, when the two of you had been cuddled up together in bed, with his arms around you and your head on his chest, that art could be interpreted any number of ways, that words were thoughts laid plain for all the world to see when you… When you…

You bit down on your clenched fist, stifling a sob as the tears rolled hot and unsteady trails down your cheeks.  _Damn him_! You wanted to scream at the top of your lungs. _How dare he, now, like this, with so much unsaid and unfinished and…_

You heard someone call your name and you dropped your hand after giving your eyes a quick wipe before turning. It was Bucky, though you noted Sam and Nat standing not too far away.

“Are you…” Bucky trailed off. “Never mind, dumb question. Is there anything I can do? For you, I mean.”

You attempted to chuckle at his question, but it came out sounding like a short bark of air that sounded harsh to your ears.

“No,” you told him, shaking your head. “I don’t… I don’t think…”

You couldn’t finish. Before Bucky could say anything more, Sam stepped forward and gave you an almost bone crushing hug. You let out another laugh attempt, but it turned into a sob as you finally gave into the urge to have a big, messy, ugly _cry_. You had held back the tears for days, and you finally couldn’t anymore. Letting Steve’s diary drop from your hands, you embraced Sam back as your sobs seemed to descend into inhuman howls of pain.

 

* * *

 

The three of them let you cry, Sam hugging you and Bucky and Nat moving close to rub your back. After you had gotten even the last little whimpers out, Nat insisted on driving you home. You knew she probably thought it was the diary that sent you into such a state and so she felt guilty, but it wasn’t that. It was just… Steve was gone, this time for good, and there was still so _much_ you had to say, and the way things had been in the months up to his death… You felt so much pain and guilt that the diary had been the last straw, that was all.

“I’m _fine_ , Nat,” you insisted, swiping at your face again even though there were no tears left to wipe away.

She only shook her head and firmly took you by the arm over to your car. In your head, you cursed her for being so damned stubborn, and then you cursed Steve, because damn it, he probably made Natasha promise that if anything happened to him to look after you like this.

And the thought of him making such arrangements almost made you cry again, both because it was a reminder of how much he had cared (at least, when there _was_ something to care about), and because there hadn’t been enough time for him to change things after things went south between you two… Or maybe he… No, you knew better.

The diary sat in your lap after you buckled your seatbelt and slumped down into the passenger’s seat, defeated. Natasha got into the car and drove you home, and as she pulled up to your apartment building, a wave of sickness and panic hit you as you stared at the building you and Steve had called home, once upon a time, and you realized that was all over now, and you had no idea what to do now. At least when he had left (when you _made_ him leave, because who were you trying to kid, damn it, he was dead now and it was all _your_ fault), there was always the possibility of him coming back for good, the two of you patching things up, trying everything again... But not now. Not ever again.

Neither you or Natasha made any move to leave your car, but you could feel her eyes almost burning into you, and you willed yourself not to look over at her. You had no idea what to say to her, how to explain the way you felt inside…

“He got the papers back,” Natasha spoke up, causing you to whip your head over in her direction. “A few hours before he left for the mission.”

You knew that, you had signed them and sent them back to him through the process server like he asked. If Natasha knew about the papers, she must have known… But how much did she know?

“He was the one who filed for divorce,” you told her, lowering your head to stare at both the diary in your lap and the rings on your left hand. “I just signed them and sent them back so we could get it over with, like he asked.”

“He filed for divorce because he thought that was what _you_ wanted.” Natasha’s voice was surprisingly gentle, but you could hear the questions in her tone regardless. She may have known Steve’s viewpoint on things, but she obviously wanted yours.

Too bad you weren’t in too much of a sharing mood.

“It was for the best,” you told her monotonously, reaching to undo your seatbelt and moving to exit the car. “I couldn’t give him what _he_ wanted.”

Natasha called your name in what sounded like shock and surprise as you exited the car with the diary tucked under your arm. You only retreated into your building, calling over your shoulder at her that she could return your car later.

 

* * *

 

The first thing you did with the diary was toss it your coffee table before flopping onto your couch and burying yourself in blankets. For the next two days you refused to move from the couch unless you had to, and refused to so much as glance at the coffee table where the diary sat.

The damn thing was taunting you. The idea of Steve’s words on a page being the only thing you had left… The idea was both tempting and terrifying. That conversation you had recalled in the church had sprang to mind unbidden more times than you cared to think of in those two days.

 

_It was during the early days of living together, before you were married, and long before things had fallen apart. You always cuddled together to sleep in those days. It was something you missed when Steve had to go away on missions, but that night, you only laid your head on his chest, breathed him in, and drank up the warmth of his body._

_“Love you,” you told him, as he kissed the top of your head and put his arms around you._

_“I love you, too.” He replied._

_The silence that followed was comfortable, and you were on the edge of drifting off to sleep when Steve called your name. You looked up at him curiously through half-lidded eyes, and you noticed the thoughtful expression on his face._

_“You ever thought about living forever?” he asked you._

_You tried biting back a giggle at the question, from **him** of all people, and failed, burying your face into his chest and descending into soft peals of laughter. He grinned at you impishly, obviously knowing why you laughed._

_“I’m serious!” he said, trying to sound indignant, but soon he, too, was chuckling. When the two of you had gotten the laughs out, he looked at you again expectantly, his expression serious. He was waiting for an answer._

_“I’m… I’m not… Do you mean that literally or in a more metaphorical sense?” you asked him. “Because I think Tony’s working on the literal thing.”_

_Steve chuckled and kissed the top of your head again._

_“Probably,” he admitted. “But no, I meant metaphorically. Maybe not living forever but creating something that immortalized you.”_

_You sighed and snuggled against Steve again. After a long moment of gathering your very important thoughts on the subject, you looked up at him._

_“I think that… Maybe writing is a good way to live forever.” You told him._

_“What about art?” he asked, and you playfully rolled your eyes at him, which earned another chuckle._

_“Art… I suppose.” you mused, resting on his chest once again as he played with your hair. “But most art that tends to last ends up being pieces that were commissioned, and not something the artist created for the sake of creating. Even then, it can be interpreted a million billion different ways, you know? The artist’s original meaning ends up getting lost in the interpretations of critics.”_

_“And writing? A lot of pieces of writing that exist were written for profit and not creating,” Steve reminded you. “And anyone who’s taken a high school English class can tell you about having to talk about symbolism that probably isn’t there.”_

_“True,” you agreed, still not ready to relinquish your position. “But lots of work has been published that was never meant for mass consumption. People’s diaries, their letters to other people, that kind of thing. That sort of stuff, it’s pretty cut-and-dry, you know? No bullshit symbolism to decipher, no plot twists to connect to previous. Just pure, straightforward words that could ensure some kind of immortality when your body’s nothing but dust.”_

_Steve made a noise that sounded like he was giving the idea serious thought before looking back down to you with a smile._

_“Never mind, sweetheart,” he murmured, kissing your forehead. “Let’s just get some sleep.”_

Until things had started falling apart, the two of you talked in bed like that all the time. Finally raising your eyes to the coffee table and the diary, you let out a huff of breath.

“Fuck you,” you aimed your words at the diary, and then let out a chuckle. You had finally cracked, you thought as helpless laughter hit you. You were talking to a fucking diary.

Then the laughter gave way to tears.

It was only when you could calm yourself that you finally picked the diary up.

 

* * *

 

 

Steve had started the diary sometime during your engagement. The entries were mostly undated, but the context was easy enough to pick up. He started the diary speaking of how you teased him about your wedding dress, dropping hints about how it looked, asking him if he wanted to see it. Like the sometimes old-fashioned gentleman he could be, he always refused, and told the diary that you only flamed his desire to be married to you.

 

> **She makes me so happy; I don’t think she even knows how much. It’s still unthinkable to me how a woman like her would look forward to marriage with a guy like me. I still feel like that scrawny invisible guy sometimes, but she just sees me, you know? Steve Rogers, not Captain America or anything else.**
> 
> **I don’t know if I can make her happy. But I want to. God, I want to.**

You fought a smile there. He only wanted you to be happy.

The problem was, you only wanted him to be happy. And you knew you couldn’t make him happy, couldn’t give him everything he deserved.

You skipped ahead in the diary to your wedding day. Steve had written the entry as you slept. It surprised you that he had written about it that day;  it had been so busy that at the end of the day you had only remembered an overwhelming sense of happiness that you could finally sleep.

 

> **Introducing Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, ladies and gentlemen.**
> 
> **She’s asleep, finally. The day was a long one, but she looks so relaxed and peaceful now and I can barely believe this beautiful woman is my wife. All this time, I never thought I would have anything like this.**
> 
> **She looked beautiful in her wedding dress, as she walked down the aisle toward me my heart felt like it would jump out of my chest. The ceremony was a blur; it felt like she and I were all that existed, in just a small moment in time.**
> 
> **Tony says I’m a sap when it comes to her, but he’s right. I’m a hopeless romantic when it comes to her, just looking at her makes me want to find all the love poetry in the world and give it to her.**
> 
> **She looked so happy saying our “I dos” that I kept expecting everything to fall apart, for her to announce that it was all this elaborate practical joke, that it just went too far. I’m still expecting it, to be honest, or to wake up any minute as my old self back in the ‘40s, and everything being an extremely detailed dream and her to be a part of it, something I dreamed to fill the emptiness inside.**

 

You shook your head, feeling overwhelmed at how deeply and freely Steve spoke of his love for you. You didn’t deserve it then and you sure as hell didn’t deserve it now.

Giving in to your extreme loathing for yourself, you forged ahead in the diary, to an entry from the darker times.

 

> **Came back from lunch with Bucky and Sam to find her on the floor again. It was much worse this time. I knew right away what happened but I ran to the hospital with her anyway, the whole time thinking it was my fault, that if I had just been home…**
> 
> **The doctor told me it happened again. She had miscarried again, and this time it was serious. They had to give her a blood transfusion, and the next few hours will be touch and go. I’ve been praying in the hospital chapel, but I feel so lost. There’s nothing I can do right now, in spite of all that I am now. I can’t help her. Not this time, or all those times before.**
> 
> **She wants so badly to be a mother. I want to be a father, but it’s hurting her to try. It might kill her this time. Even if it doesn’t, I know she’ll just want to keep trying. But… I’d rather have her, by ourselves, than put her through this damn pain again. I’ve stood by and let it happen too many times already. I can’t lose her. I won’t.**

 

That had been your fifth miscarriage, you remembered. You remembered the way you passed out, coming to in the hospital to Steve at your side, how you looked into his eyes and just _knew_ you had lost another baby. You remembered how after that, the two of you had to go through so many tests to see if there had been a cause for all the miscarriages, the results revealing that your body’s immune system saw the baby in your womb as a foreign invader every single time, and triggered a miscarriage as a result.

You thought he hated you. He refused to touch you for so long afterward. It took months, and even then, it seemed like the two of you only made love when he came back from a difficult mission, when he was exhausted and his guard was down enough that he turned to you inside of ignoring you like he always seemed to otherwise. The last time you ever made love was one such time. It was only after, lying together in bed that it all seemed to finally split open.

 

_It was the first time in a long while that the two of you had made love, and you had given yourselves over completely and taken your time, lying together in silence that was tense instead of comforting like it used to be. You knew, as Steve pulled you close and you laid your head on his chest, that the two of you had the same thought going through your minds, but you pushed it away from you as you looked up to find him gazing at you with a look that was both adoring and concerned. It almost broke your heart, because you knew **why** he was looking at you like that, and you hated it._

_“Are you okay?” he asked, breaking your train of thought as he reached over to tuck some loose strands of hair behind your ear. You gave him a small smile that, in spite of all those thoughts teasing at the back of your mind, felt genuine._

_“Yeah.” You nodded, laying your head back on his chest as he continued to play with your hair._

_The two of you laid in silence once more as you closed your eyes and Steve let his fingers trail away from your hair and traced patterns on your back. You thought about breaking the silence, to fill the room with something other than the growing darkness that was your thoughts…_

_“I love you, you know,” Steve’s voice broke through your gloom, and you flicked your eyes up at him to see him gazing back at you, a slight frown crossing his features._

_“I love you, too.” You told him._

_“You know that… You know what th-“ You knew what he was going to say, and you sighed._

_“Steve, don’t.” You moved your eyes away from his, looking at the open door to your bedroom. You focused on the door frame, not wanting to think about the empty room across from yours._

_“We could adopt.” He burst out suddenly. You sat up in bed in shock._

_“What?!” You found your voice unexpectedly rising in pitch. He hadn’t mentioned children at all since the results came back that you were the one who was damaged and defective. And now he wanted to adopt? Why not, he barely touched you anyway. He probably just wanted a kid to complete the whole package, that damned All-American image. “Am I that repulsive to you?”_

_“Repulsive?! Where do you get tha-“ Steve started, but you moved to get out of bed and get dressed._

_You couldn’t breathe, it felt like your chest was bursting and your skin was on fire._

_“You don’t have to say it, Steve, not when your actions make it pretty damn clear!” You shouted at him as he stood up and tried to pull you close._

_“Sweetheart, don’t be like this. Please talk to me, honey, I don’t know what I did but-“ He tried to kiss your forehead, but you resisted and shoved him away._

_“Don’t, Steve. Not now. Just… Just leave, okay? I j-just… Just get out.” You told him._

_“What?! Baby, please-“_

_“No, just leave. Please, just go.” you turned away from him, throwing on a nightgown and walking into the kitchen without a glance behind you._

Steve had packed his things that night, heading to Avengers Tower. From there, you were sent a flurry of texts begging for a chance to talk things out, to give the two of you one more shot. After weeks of this, Steve had stopped texting you for two months, then sent you one of the last communications you would have.

 **Can we fix this?** He texted you.

 _No_ , you texted back, and at the time you thought you meant it. Things between you were so broken there was no chance of fixing things. Besides, what was the point if he thought you were so repulsive he wouldn’t touch you and could barely stand to even look at you?

**So that’s it, then?**

_I guess so._

**You guess?**

_What do you want me to say, Steve?_

For an hour you received no response. Then he texted you again.

**Fine. I’ll file the papers next week and have them sent to you. Just sign them and send them back with the process server. No need to get lawyers involved.**

_Fine_.

That was the last thing you sent him, besides the signed papers.

 

* * *

 

 

It took you another three days to read the last entry. Part of it was that you didn’t want Steve’s words to end, even if they were negative. The other reason was because you dreaded the idea of his final thoughts of you, and how he must have hated you.

But in the end, you read it.

 

> **So she sent the papers back. Once these get filed, that’s it, it’s over.**
> 
> **It’s all my fault. I should have tried harder that last night I saw her. I should have told her everything in my head. But I didn’t and now… Now she hates me, and she has every right to. I love her so much, even after everything, but I know this is better for her.**
> 
> **When the doctors told us why she kept miscarrying, I knew it was my fault. It’s the super serum. It has to be. There’s no other reason her body would reject so many pregnancies. Something about it has to do something to the baby, something that makes her body attack it and kill it. They say it’s her, but it’s really me.**
> 
> **I thought I could deal with the burden alone. I thought maybe just not doing anything would solve it all. No sex, no babies, right?**
> 
> **I’m an idiot. How could I not tell her that the reason I stayed away was not because I hated her, but because I love her and don’t want her hurt? I know telling her what I think would just make her want to damn it all and keep trying, but I can’t have her die because of this. She would die eventually, and probably the baby as well. I couldn’t have that, to be without her. Even if a baby managed to live, she would still die, and the last thing I want is for that to happen.**
> 
> **I’d give it all up,  my shot at parenthood, my shot at happiness, her, if it means she lives.**
> 
> **Nothing else means more.**

 

The last entry had you weeping openly. He thought it was him? The super serum? But… That made no sense! It had been your body doing it, rejecting the pregnancies one by one.

But you knew his reasoning did make some sense. In the end, that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was the extent he had been willing to do to see you alive.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” you demanded of the diary between sobs. “I would have understood, we could have… We…”

But you knew that your own self-loathing had done most of the dirty work. If it hadn’t been for that, you would have seen through Steve a mile away. The two of you could have talked it out, and decided… well, whatever you would have decided.

But in the end, all that didn’t matter. Steve was gone now, and all those things were just thoughts in your head about what could have been.


End file.
